In through the green wall you went, virtually becoming a part of it yourself. To lead was a joke—it just meant that most of the time, you couldn’t see where you were going. You were down on your knees trying to squeeze through a gap in the tangle when suddenly you felt you were being watched. You looked up and saw you were almost nose to nose with what might have been a giant metallic eye. In fact it was the end of a huge cylinder, a massive petrol tank, and then you realised that was more or less what it really was. Napalm! On the metal end, the words ‘Hi There’ were daubed in red. Borrowed, you remembered, from the movie ‘Dr Strangelove’.
 “G’day,” you murmured, smiling, backing off.
You edged your way around it—it was so overgrown that it had plainly been there for months.
 “Be a few of these fuckers around,” Nigel said.
There were. Just ten feet away you tripped over a 1000 pounder.
 “You know these things are worth about ten dollars a pound,” Bugsy remarked.
 “You want to put it in your fucking pocket and take it home?”
 “No thanks Nigel.”
 “A bloody lot of money to spend on something that didn’t work,” Greyman commented.
 “Hasn’t worked yet,” Nigel corrected.
You immediately found new energy for hurrying on.

More wonderful Ray Bradbury short stories in The Day it Rained Forever.  Several are very memorable. The Wonderful Ice-cream Suit tells of a bunch of young hoods who raise ten dollars each to buy a $60 suit between them. They decide to wear it one day a week each (and one for cleaning). For each this day utterly transforms their lives, for the suit draws them women and fame and power and wealth. And all the complications that go with it—for they cannot be themselves when in the suit and continually worry about what they others are doing in it. In the end, the suit is rejected.
     In a Season in Calm Weather tells of a struggling painter who encounters Picasso on the beach, and watches the great man create a masterpiece in the sand. But the tide is coming in... The man races through a series of unsuccessful plans to save the work, which Picasso completes and walks away, leaving him to it. Eventually, the man must let the tide come in.
    In Almost the End of the World, two prospectors return from months of isolation to the rundown sleepy desert town and find it the same and yet very different. Everything paintable has been painted, everything broken has been mended, the people are well dressed and clean and smile and talk to each other everywhere and the night is filled with activity at every venue. What has happened? A cosmic ray knocked out the microwaves and everyone’s television no longer works.
    Bradbury wrote many volumes of stories, and when Rod Serling began to ran out of puff writing every teleplay for The Twilight Zone, (in the third series), Bradbury and Richard Mathieson (The Incredible Shrinking Man) helped him out. Late in life, he again attempted a couple of novels, one about his lifelong friend Ray Harryhausen, but they will be dealt with in their proper place.
    All Bradbury stories are fine but those in The October Country were horror rather than sci-fi and thereby less remarkable. And The Golden Apples of the Sun which are all okay but not particularly memorable except, of course, The Fog Horn, which for me provided the great adventure of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms which I raised earlier on. Bradbury is everywhere. He is still generally regarded as the best writer of Sci Fi stories.